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The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, C. 520 A.D.https://whatartdoes.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-miracle-of-the-loaves-and-fishes-c-520-a-d/
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“Painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who read” – Pope Gregory the Great.

In this new series, we are going to look at depictions of Jesus Christ in Europe throughout history in an effort to determine what effects historical events of the time had on the depiction of the son of God, and how changing artistic schools chose to represent this one subject.

Found in a basilica in Ravenna, this mosaic is one of the few examples of Greek mosaics that survive from this period, as most were destroyed in the 8th Century by iconoclasts; a school of thought that gained control in the Byzantine Empire from 754 AD that believed that all religious art should be forbidden in churches for fear of creating false idols. This dramatic movement came about following lively debate as to the place of art in churches – how were newly converted pagans to grasp the message of a single and invisible God if art were constantly made in His likeness? This is where the quote from Pope Gregory the Great comes in – it created a defence against those who weren’t in favour of art in churches in that the man with the highest ranking in the Catholic Church had come out in favour of it. Nevertheless, Byzantine Christian art adopted a unique restrained style; its aim was not to decorate, but to tell a story as clearly and concisely as possible.

The piece marks a progression from the traditional Hellenistic style; where the artist could have chosen to paint a huge, bustling scene of 5000 people, they have instead chosen to strip the picture down to its absolute basics, using the laborious process of mosaic. Instead of being used to depict scenery, the artist has created a background that consists solely of gold tile, concentrating the viewer’s eye on the central characters, thereby emphasising the sacred nature of the scene.

Christ occupies the centre of the picture, depicted as a clean-shaven, long-haired man donning a purple robe. He is surrounded by four apostles who carry food with covered hands – a custom of those bringing gifts to their ruler at the time of the mosaic’s creation. Christ does not acknowledge them however, his gaze, as well as theirs, is fixed upon the viewer, for it is they he is about to feed. This makes for an interesting composition – while at first the lack of movement like that seen previously in Greek and Roman in addition to the full frontal presentation of the figures may suggest a simple lack of skill, the way in which the clothes of figures are shown to to drape over their bodies points to a previous knowledge of Greek art. From this we can deduce that the omission of these techniques was done out of restraint and dedication to the sacred nature of the tale rather than incapability on behalf of the artist. This idea is strengthened when we pay attention to the way in which the drapery of the robes Jesus and his apostles wear show so clearly their joints in a similar fashion to that of classical Greek sculpture. In addition to this, it must also be noted that some skill must have been needed in order to accurately mix the different coloured stones in order to create a convincing skin tone and the colour of the vegetation surrounding the figures.

This mosaic shows immense dedication to the spreading of Christian beliefs to the newly converted. While skill on the behalf of the artist is evident through the inclusion of some amount of detail, the overall aim of the piece is one of truth to original message of the miracle rather than the shock and awe of later religious art.

Aside from their ability to shock, the other defining feature of the YBA’s work and the BritArt era in general was huge amounts of profit these artists were able to make. Art was beginning to be approached to as a business, a means to make money, and this had a huge influence on the work produced. The YBA’s artwork started to adopt motifs, which ensured their work would be recognized, cementing their ‘brand’ within the global art industry. Whilst it is questionable as to whether this has had noticeable effect on the style and aesthetic of British art today, there is no doubt that the YBA’s financial success would have influenced their approach to art work and its distribution.

The origins of their business savvy approach to art can be traced back to their time at Goldsmiths. Studying art at university in the start of the 1990’s was far from being filled with optimism; British art had been fairly stagnant for a number of years and the artistic industries had been neglected due to the deep economic recession. After 12 years of Conservative power, most young students had become disillusioned with the government and were hoping for change. Artists such as Damien Hirst were therefore looking to create work that would be marketable and financially successful. In order to do so he needed to develop a motif throughout his work that would be both original and relatively shocking. Since his childhood Hirst had been fascinated with death, and wanted to find away to encapsulate death in a clean and aesthetically pleasing way. In 1990 this was achieved; ‘A Thousand Years’ was Hirst’s first work to include his famous vitrines. The vitrine contained two compartments, in one fly larvae hatched and were drawn into the second compartment by the scent of a severed and bleeding cows head, after which they then moved on to an Insect-O-Cutor where they ultimately met their fate. The presentation of such a short underwhelming life cycle makes a poignant comment on the transient nature of life and the all-encompassing force of death. Considered widely as Hirst’s greatest and most powerful piece of work, he continued to adopt the vitrines in order to emulate its success and cement his brand as a businessman. This lead to Hirst’s most infamous work and probably the most iconic piece of contemporary art made to this day. ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ 1992, or ‘the shark’ as it is more commonly known, pretty much defined the YBA era, encapsulating every nuance of British art produced at that time; a shocking conceptual installation emphasising the theme of life and death, costing a lot of money to produce and even more to buy, $12,000,000 to be exact. Having made over $300,000,000 throughout his career it would seem natural that his profitability has influenced British artists today to create branded and expensive pieces of work with constant themes and motifs, however it would appear that is not the case. Whilst today the majority of artists maintain their certain style, this is only to be expected. For instance graphic artist Joe Webb’s work since his appearance in 2011 has remained relatively similar in style over the last 3 years; however there has been a sense of progression. His collage pieces have changed in both compositions and media, from his earlier standard portraits of couples to more recent more narrative works such as ‘International Response’ 2014. To further emphasise this point Webb has recently experimented with the medium of gifs, a contemporary medium that has been relatively untouched within the realm of fine art. It may seem obvious that artists grow and develop their own styles over time, however I feel this is not the case with many of the YBA’s such as Hirst and Lucas who appeared over the BritArt decade to produce conceptually and aesthetically similar pieces of work throughout the era.

This stagnancy of marketable ideas throughout the YBA era can almost certainly be pinned down on the revolutionary and unique way contemporary art was beginning to be distributed and exhibited in the early 1990’s. Whilst the decade was to see a huge revolution in the style of work produced, it also saw the rise of two colossal figureheads of the contemporary art market and more specifically, the YBA generation. In 1993, a young art dealer by the name of Jay Jopling opened The White Cube, a small room in Duke Street; it was at the time one of the only commercial galleries to exhibit solely contemporary artists in London. However this was not the only divergence from the norm, whilst most traditional commercial galleries at the time only permitted perspective buyers to observe their work, the White Cube was open to the public, allowing greater exposure for the artists exhibiting there. Due to timing and location, Jopling formed a connection with many of the YBA’s and the White Cube was becoming famed for its one person YBA shows, such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marc Quinn. The White Cube provided the YBA’s a platform to exhibit their work in both a commercial and public atmosphere, which meant they could develop their work to increase both critical praise and financial success. However since the heyday of the YBA’s, The White Cube has moved and expanded with galleries in Masons Yard, Bermondsey and even Hong-Kong and its focus on young British talent has dwindled with greater emphasis on the international, and more specifically the ever expanding Chinese art scene, for instance currently in the White Cubes London galleries, the work of two young conceptual Chinese artists, He Xiangyu and Liu Wei are being exhibited. It could therefore be argued that with lesser opportunities than the YBA generation, British artists today haven’t the chance of developing financially successful and marketable work, and therefore the branded aspect of the BritArt era has been lost.

Yet, whilst Jopling and The White Cube no longer focuses as heavily on young British talent, Charles Saatchi has remained constant in discovering and sharing young gifted domestic artists since the early 1990’s. Saatchi played a colossal role in marketing and sharing the work of the YBA’s, and in the case of Damien Hirst, he even provided him with the funds and means to produce his first vitrine works such as ‘The Physical Impossibility…’. Saatchi’s involvement with the YBA’s can be embodied by the ‘Sensation’ exhibition, which many consider as the pinnacle of the YBA era. The exhibition at the Royal Academy was solely from Saatchi’s personal collection, containing works by nearly all the YBAs including Lucas, Hume, Hirst and the Chapman Brothers. Due to the shocking nature of much of the work, ‘Sensation’ had caused a media frenzy and quickly became the biggest, most talked about exhibition of the decade with much of the controversy being stemmed from one sole piece, ‘Myra’ 1995 by YBA Marcus Harvey is a portrait of the child killer Myra Hindley made out of hundreds of copies of a child’s handprint. The uproar from child protection charities only aided Saatchi in sharing his collection and therefore increasing the value of all the work involved in the exhibition. Whilst today, Saatchi’s collections haven’t made waves to the extent of his YBA shows, Saatchi has continued to support and endorse todays young British artists who appear regularly within all his collections, however a current exhibition entitled ‘New Order: British Art Today’ focuses (as the name suggests) solely on up and coming British artists, including work from previously discussed artists such as Dominic From Luton and Jodie Carey. Even though Saatchi’s exhibiting of these artists has allowed to them to be exposed to the public market, one can get the sense that there isn’t the same level as individual exposure that YBA’s such as Lucas and Hirst faced. Without this celebrity status artists today can’t create a public image to the same extent of their predecessors and it therefore comes to no surprise that today’s British art has lost that sense of cult-status and self-importance. Nevertheless this is no way a bad thing, it would seem that today the emphasis has returned to the art itself as opposed to the celebrity of the artist. British art has now turned away from this relatively superficial and profitable aspect that the YBA’s, and dealers such as Saatchi and Jopling held with great importance in the 1990’s.

Income will always be a concern for artists just as it is for any individual, however the last part of this discussion helps to illuminate how today, artists have taken steps away from creating purely profitable artistic products. The YBAs emphasis on lucrativeness was out of necessity and with the help of business savvy individuals such as Saatchi and Jopling, they managed to create an industry upon their public image in which their artwork was product. Today this is not the case, and the art industry has returned to more humble sensibilities with the art as opposed to the huge price tags in the forefront.

To what extent has the Brit Art movement had an effect on British contemporary art today?

Due to the general nature of this question, I have split my discussion into a number of chapters, each will outline and evaluate a certain factor or theme that was prevalent within the YBA’s work. Each chapter will examine themes including the shock factor, the marketability and the stylisation and technical skill of both the YBA’s work and British art produced within today’s climate.

Shock Factor

The YBA’s are synonymous with shock; it therefore seems natural to begin this essay analysing how if at all this theme has developed within the world of British contemporary art. The BritArt generation was one of the most successful within the history of Modern Art in stunning and disgusting their audiences and if contemporary British artists were to take anything from the YBA’s, this brashness in their portrayal of ideas would be it.

When it comes to producing shocking work, it seems that for artists the most prevalent themes to convey both twenty years ago and today are sex and violence. Starting with the former, within the YBA circle, Sarah Lucas’ work was the most consistent (and still is today) in addressing sex and most prominently society’s view towards women and their objectification. One only has to look at Bitch (1995) to witness Lucas’s unsettling reductions of the female form with huge emphasis on the genitalia. One reason why Lucas’ work is so effortlessly disgusting is her use of commonly used euphemisms and imagery, for instance the use of melons in Bitch and recurring portrayal of fried eggs in her other work. By doing so Lucas leaves nothing to the imagination and therefore provokes instantaneous and guttural reactions from her audiences.

However, Lucas was in no way individual in her boisterous approach to contentious themes. In many ways, artists that were approaching violence and death were being even more shocking. Matt Collinshaw’s Bullet Hole(1988) was one of the very first YBA pieces exhibited at the famous Freeze final year exhibition. The large grids of canvases (15 in total) come together to create a high definition and close up photograph of a head wound. The sheer scale of the image as well as its lack of depth gives the viewer no respite, creating a brutally repulsive piece of work. Shock tactics became hugely popular within the BritArt movement and it soon became clear that British audiences in the 1990’s just weren’t impressed unless they were revolted. These artists had unearthed and tapped into the British audience’s conscious and were producing work that they wanted to see, over-sexualized and filled violent and morbid imagery. These kinds of interests do not just disappear and therefore artists since have still been catering to the publics shocking wants.

Nicola Frimpong is an artist whose work perfectly embodies this component of the YBA’s. Her watercolor paintings provide an account of her own sexual and racial oppression and are saturated with violent sexual imagery. For example, The Accidental Birth of Nicola – I Should Have Been Born a Boy(2012) is a very personal account of Frimpong’s insecurities and personal resentments. Like when faced with Bullet Hole or Bitch, the viewer is instantly subjected to explicit imagery only emphasised by the use of text – “I’m not black”, “I should have been born a boy” are written across the piece and as with any piece of text within a piece of art, the is eye inevitably drawn to it. It must be suggested then that Frimpong has adopted many of the elements introduced by the YBA’s in order to create captivating and poignant (whilst unsettling) pieces. Her work has been a massive success in recent years, making it on to the Bloomberg New Contemporaries short-list and being exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery it only shows that audiences are still looking to be provoked long after the YBA’s introduction of shock tactics in the realm of popular art.

Apart from its graphic imagery, another reason why Frimpong’s work is considered to be so shocking is the incredibly personal nature of her art. Throughout her pieces, she identifies how she has battled with both her race and gender; this can be seen in The Accidental Birth with the black figure (probably representative of the artist) looking at the blond white male staring back at him in the mirror. This blunt yet intimate approach to art was something also refined by many of the YBA’s, in particular, one of the most famous, Tracey Emin. Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995(1995), is probably one of Emin’s most autobiographical pieces of work: the use of a tent in itself is intimate, a small enclosed environment specifically designed for sleeping. The name of anyone she had shared a bed with (or even a tree) was hand stitched into the tent, and this use of embroidery adds to the tactile and personal aspect of the piece. While there was nothing vulgar or disgusting about the aesthetics of the piece, Emin was condemned for being too open and crass for exhibiting her apparent promiscuity. However this openness is a recurrent theme within her work, as Rachel Taylor for the Tate has written about The Last Thing I Said to You was Don’t Leave Me Here II(2000), ‘the image invites the viewer to emphasise with the artist and to respect the emotional honesty with which she documents and shares her pain.’ (Tate Website). In the case of this self-portrait, Emin is presenting her viewer with a childhood tale of isolation and abuse. Personalizing it through the use of a ramshackle beach hut as she grew up in Margate by the sea, Emin crouches naked in the corner, vulnerable and exposed to the audience, leaving little for the viewer to interpret, much like the work of Frimpong today. Other British artists are also producing personal and narrative pieces, for instance work by Dominic From Luton (that’s his name) provides an insightful and agonizing account of what its like to grow up in Luton (voted ‘Britain’s Crappiest Town’). Images such as My Dads Pants (2013) are overwhelmingly pathetic but with a cause. By choosing to exhibit images of sole Reebok trainers and his father’s underwear, Dominic is highlighting how unappealing life is in Luton; his work conveys the social and economic issues he personally faces with the rest of Luton’s population. Whilst these images do not contain the same level of shocking self-exposure and intimacy of Tracey Emin’s work in the 1990’s, both Dominic From Luton and Frimpong provide their own personal responses to what it is to be alive today, an aspect that made the YBA’s work so popular.

Throughout the 1990’s the YBA’s were continually pushing boundaries in terms of the media they used to create their work, and one material that became a recurring motif in the decade, was blood. This morbid element was first introduced in the BritArt era by Damien Hirst in his installation A Thousand Years(1990). The piece presents its own ecosystem where flies live off the severed head of a cow sitting within a pool of its own. It is an attack of the senses and the viewer is naturally repelled by the work however there is an element of tenderness as to how Hirst has managed to capture the transience of life in such an isolated environment. Contrasting the beautiful and the grotesque is another theme that was adopted by the YBA’s and this can be seen in another bloody piece of work by sculptor Marc Quinn. Self(1991 – Present), is an ongoing piece of work where the artist casts his head in 4.5 litres of his own blood every 5 years. Similar to A Thousand Years, Quinn’s self portrait, at first glance, renders the viewer in disgust – however on second thought, the overwhelming feeling to this piece is admiration to artist’s personal devotion to his work. In its simplest form, his work is the perfect embodiment of the artist and so must in one way be considered as beautiful. Whilst in recent years, there has been a relative decline in such gory production techniques, artists have continued to use materials such as blood, however to create more traditionally beautiful pieces of work. Jodie Carey is a British artist who uses bodily elements such as blood and bone throughout her work, for example her flower sculpture The Daily Mail (2005) made from bloodstained newspapers and her more recent Untitled (Blood Dust)(2010), which is a patterned rectangular expanse of powdered blood. ‘Untitled (Blood Dust)’ allows the viewer to contemplate the value of life as it laid before them, similar to both the work of Hirst and Quinn, Corey manages the soften the brutality of the piece through the soft and upholstered aesthetic of her work. Carey’s work transforms the primal element into something delicate and beautiful whilst also maintaining the element of shock that makes her work so captivating. This development shows how British contemporary artists today have taken from components introduced by the YBA’s and have cultivated and matured them in order to fit with todays wants and styles.

It would therefore appear the shock factor that was so well adopted by the Young British Artists of the 1990s has had a lasting legacy on British art up until this day. Whilst the stunning aesthetics of many of the installation artists such as Lucas and Hirst are no longer being replicated it would appear that artists are more willing than ever to approach contentious or highly personal themes or the use of obscure materials that still contain the element of shock. This is something that audiences grew accustomed to under the monopoly of the YBA’s and therefore the demand for an amount of shock would still remain.

When Marcel Duchamp produced Fountain in 1917, the general response from the art world was one of outrage, so much so that it was the only piece rejected from the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, an exhibition which based itself on its intent to accept every piece of work it received. It was regarded as a joke – a urinal inscribed with the name “R. Mutt” couldn’t possibly have been seen as art, could it?

Well, yes, it could. Known as “readymades”, Duchamp’s work blurred the lines between benign object and artistic statement, and the criteria by which a work of art was judged. The society chose to reject Duchamp’s work on grounds of indecency and plagiarism, as Fountain was the work of a plumber, not Duchamp. Art or not, it was lost shortly after its rejection, and was never seen again until a replica was made in 1950 for an exhibition in New York.

45 years later, Andy Warhol exhibited Campbell’s Soup Cans; 32 paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans laid out in a grid, as if on a shelf in a shop. Two years later, he went one better with Brillo Boxes – plywood sculptures of Brillo packaging. Instead of being shunned, Warhol was hailed as a genius. Why? What separated his work from that of Duchamp? Both artists had taken items that could have been bought by anybody in a shop and put them on display – at what moment had they both become art? At the time of their purchase? At the moment the artist altered them for their own purposes? Or the moment the museum they were displayed in accepted them? Considering Warhol’s work here is practically Duchamp’s adapted to another time, what makes Warhol so original?

Warhol is original because of the purpose behind his work. While Fountain was originally made as a practical joke by Duchamp to question what exactly makes art, Warhol’s work acted as a devastating comment on the role of the consumer in sixties America.

Through his work, Warhol sought to reduce art to its core: a commodity – something produced for a fee. He did this by not only depicting commodities within his art, but going so far as to actually produce his art in a way more commonly associated with that of mass produced factory items. The beginning of Warhol’s move to manufacturing his can be seen in Campbell’s Soup Cans: while the majority of the cans are painted on by hand, Warhol added the epaulets that decorate the bottom of the cans with a stamp: laziness or a sign of the revolution that was to come?

Warhol’s art during the sixties is the most famous he produced in his lengthy career, and is often seen as the face of the pop art movement. Among his most famous subjects were iconic parts of American culture: dollar bills, coke cans and electric chairs. His 1962 piece 200 Dollar Bills is probably the strongest manifestation of what he was trying to achieve through his art – the piece cut out the middleman and went straight in, depicting what drove the contemporary American: the dollar bill. Warhol was raised in a religious home, and worship became one of the main themes within his work. 200 Dollar Bills acted as a metaphor for a capitalist world’s worship of the dollar, and absolutely bridged the gap between commodity and work of art by not only its depiction of money, but through its production – the piece is a 7 1/2 wide painting made through the process of silkscreening; a process used by Warhol during his time as a commercial illustrator.

This theme was expanded upon further by Warhol in 1962 after the death of Marilyn Monroe. In Gold Marilyn Monroe, Warhol commented on America’s relationship with celebrity culture by almost deifying the late Monroe. Her head, printed in garish, clashing colours, floats weightlessly on a background of gold paint, reminiscent of Byzantine Christian paintings of Mary. By doing this, Warhol made Monroe a martyr of the consumer age, and expanded on this in his later diptychs of her face by saying that her status as a celebrity that could be bought or seen pretty much anywhere made her as much of a commodity as a Campbell’s soup can.

So how far did Warhol change modern art? By creating a studio called the Factory and hiring other people to do much of his work, Warhol broke the boundaries of what could be considered a work by an artist. The disassociation of an artist from their work has almost become commonplace in the contemporary world, and Warhol’s influence on these artists is undoubtable. Damien Hirst’s debt to Warhol’s work is one of the highest – Hirst is famous for using repetition within his work, and for hiring other people to do much of it for him. A good example of this is his spot paintings: among his most famous pieces of work, they started out as grids of spots hand painted by the artist himself – already the grid formation echoed the layout of many of Warhol’s earlier works. However, soon Hirst started to employ assistants to draw the spots for him, and then tried to make their appearance as machine like as possible by covering the whole the compass left in the middle of each circle as if the paintings had been constructed mechanically, an undeniable parallel with the mechanical work of Warhol in his Factory.

Warhol was also the first artist to exhibit film as art. His experimental movies, many of them shot in the Factory, launched Warhol’s superstars, and were known for their long takes of their subjects doing not much else but being themselves. Known for his quote about people in the future having their 15 minutes of fame, Warhol both prophesised and launched the culture of reality TV. Through his superstars, Warhol created an ironic critique of Hollywood culture, creating the idea through heiresses like Edie Sedgwick that people need not require talent in drama or music in order to be famous – they need only be themselves.

Warhol’s homosexuality was a major theme within his art. In his 1977 series Torsos, Warhol explored the sexualisation of the male figure in his work, piece which became hugely influential to artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, who depicted acts of gay sex within his work. Just as Warhol’s Pop art pieces had pushed the boundaries between art and illustration, Torsos and Sex Parts blurred the lines between art and pornography.

Through Warhol and Pop art, traditional art had died. Pop art focused on the now, what was real and what was contemporary. Warhol pioneered the idea of the Happening with his Exploding Plastic Inevitable Show featuring the band he produced, the Velvet Underground. It could be argued that any art post-1987, the year of his death, has been influenced by Warhol in one way or another. Warhol’s influence is so great that it could almost be used as a milestone in the history of art – he marked the end of the era of the artist being solely responsible for his work (yes, it is true that artists before him employed assistants, but Warhol’s creative process really was more like a production line than anything else, a small business) – without him, there would have been no Jeff Koons, no Damien Hirst. Without his pioneering of film as an art form, there would be no video installations, no reality television, no 15 minutes of fame. In the words of David Cronenberg, “he created his own universe and became its star,” and his 15 minutes are far from over.

“The only way to continue in the spirit of the avant-garde is to experiment with your relation to tradition.” – Jeff Wall

The hawk-eyed among us will have spotted the rise in population of a strange creature during the past 188 years. Copying its surroundings to the finest level of detail, sometimes even bettering them, the photograph has come a long way since its arrival in 1826. The invention of the photograph has brought the proverbial mountain to Mohamed, but many would argue that by doing so it has irreparably changed the way we get to the mountain the first place. If photography brings you that mountain, what use is a map?

It was not always this way, however. When Nicéphore Niépce created the first documented photograph in 1826, it would have been difficult to see the full effect it would eventually have on painting as a medium. The idea in itself was not new: it could be said that many paintings pre-invention of the camera were photographs in a way, having been drawn mostly in camera obscuras. Besides, the photograph took days to make and the image quality was abysmal; it would have been easier to simply have painted it.

For years, the difference between the two art forms boiled down to a question of representation vs depiction. Photography was seen as a representative form of art, meaning it

Served only to look like something or resemble it,

To stand in for something or someone,

Or to present something for a second time; to re-present it.

There is a viable argument that this could be the reason that Niépce’s View from the window at Le Gras is so underwhelming for such a technological achievement: precisely because it is a photograph. In the modern world, photographs are seen as cheap – they often take less than a second to create and can easily be replicated. Therefore they are disposable. If the silver plate of View from the Window at Le Gras was lost, Niépce could easily have positioned the camera in the exact same place and taken another photograph with the exact same settings and ended up with largely the same result. Paintings on the other hand, are priceless because they aren’t disposable – months, often years worth of work go into creating a great painting. If a painting were to be lost, it would be virtually impossible to recreate it completely, therefore painting is seen by many as a higher form of art than photography.

Take Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, for instance. This is an instantly recognisable painting, painted by one of the key figures in the transition from realism to impressionism. But just what is it that makes this painting so special? The immediate thing that strikes you about this painting is the melancholy air conveyed by its model, Suzon, a young woman who worked at the bar of the Folies-Bergère. Her placement by Manet right at the centre of the piece ensures she is the first thing the viewer notices; the second, her facial expression. Her eyes point slightly downward, portraying her as so engrossed in her melancholia that she fails to even engage directly with the viewer. Manet expands on this, depicting Suzon as wearing a locket, a symbol of better times, and through the placement of a bowl of oranges almost directly in front of her (bowls of oranges are used by Manet as symbolic of prostitution in many of his paintings). However, the most important part of this painting is the background. Suzon stands alone in a room full of people, separated by a pane of glass. She is imprisoned behind this bar, and her loneliness is emphasised by her being the only figure in the painting represented outside of this mirror: she is not part of the crowd she craves to join.

It is left ambiguous who the man reflected in the right hand side of the mirror is. Is it Manet, separating himself from his model? Or is it the viewer, a sinister Jack the Ripper lookalike walking up to a lonely girl behind a bar? Through this ambiguity, Manet raises questions on the nature of humanity and the trust we place in appearances. This painting is also important because it expands on the theme of the viewer as subject in the painting, famously depicted in Diego Velázquez’ painting Las Meninas. In this painting, Velázquez explores how others perceive the world they live in. The painting itself is a royal portrait, however none of the figures the eye is drawn to at first glance are remotely royal. The artist is depicted painting on the left hand side, and the group of people on the right are courtiers. It is not until the viewer looks to the background of the painting, to the mirror right at its centre, that they see themselves cast as King and Queen of Spain. Once again, the viewer is forced to question both how they see themselves, and how they are seen by others.

Another way in which it could be argued that painting is a higher form of art than photography is that we are constantly exposed to photographs like nothing else: they pounce at us from advertisements, from television screens, from books, from our phones. Paintings on the other hand are far more exclusive a medium: seeing a famous painting requires the effort of a journey and the possibility of paying for admission to a gallery. They are not only set on a wall; they are set on a pedestal thought to be unachievable by the same medium as the holiday snap and the selfie.

So where does Jeff Wall come into all of this? Wall is a Canadian photographer and art historian born in 1946, known for not only fusing elements of art history and social commentary, but also bridging the gaps of the very natures of painting and photography themselves. It has been argued that his work and contribution to the start of the conceptual photography movement has been a huge contributing factor in the growing dominance of photography over painting in the last few decades.

In an effort to make his photographs as like paintings as possible, Wall does away with the disposability of his images; he doesn’t make any prints, and presents them as huge light boxes, much like the large frames often attributed to famous paintings. Without replicas, and having been presented in this unique way, his photographs have gone on to sell for upwards of $3 million dollars. The absence of prints also makes his work like paintings in that to see them in the flesh, one must go to a gallery: they gain the exclusivity of paintings.

One of the best examples of this fusion can be found in The Storyteller, a photograph that uses classical compositional techniques to provoke discussion on contemporary issues. The photograph itself is about progression of time, and the negative effects it can bring. The title refers to the cultural paradigm of the storyteller, a role that has become obsolete in a world of books and television, and also to the way the painting is meant to be looked at: from left to right. Forests and greenery dominate the left side of the photograph, broken up by the ship-like mass of motorway overpass and concrete that takes up the right hand side of the photograph. However, this serves only as a background to the true subjects of the photograph: the groups of Native Canadians dotted around the picture. As the photograph progresses from left to right and time moves on, the number of people in the groups diminishes, signifying the declining population of Native Canadians in Vancouver. This harks back to the painting from which the photograph borrows some of its compositional elements, Dejeuner sur l’herbe by Manet, which was greeted with shock and distaste when it was first shown to the public. There are parallels to be drawn between the prejudice caused by the naked woman in Manet’s painting daring to look the viewer directly in the eye, and the prejudice experienced by Native Canadians as their population falls.

Described by art critic Jed Perl as Wall’s signature piece, Picture for Women takes the themes offered by Manet in A Bar at the Folies Bergere and expands them for the 20th century. Borrowing its composition from A Bar, Picture for Women presents an image of the relationship between the 20th century artist and his model. Both pieces use the motif of the mirror, but the reasoning is far different in Picture for Women. In this photograph, the viewer sees only the reflection of the artist and his model: they are the ones cut off from the subjects of the painting, much like the experience of watching television.This separation adds a feminist angle to the photograph: the model exists only in a world that Wall has created: is Wall using the situation of a photo shoot to satirise the perceived dependence of women on men? The model doesn’t seem to be complying with the photographer’s demands: is this a symbol for the empowerment of women?

However, the most important part of this photograph is again, placed directly in the centre. If this is a mirror, where is the reflection of the viewer? The replacement of the viewer with a camera is a play on Velazquez’ changing of perspective: during a trip to Europe in 1977, Wall’s observations of paintings by Velazquez and Goya led him to the conclusion that the prevalence of photography and film has changed the way in which we as a species see the world, and therefore the artist will never be able to create paintings like the great artists again. With this in mind, it completely makes sense why Wall has replaced the reflection of the viewer with the camera: because we now see the world as a camera sees it, not how people who lived pre-photography saw it. Wall raises an ironic point on our species’ artistic regression at the hands of the photograph, through the use of the a photograph.

So where does that leave us? Photography is a medium that develops by the day: compared to painting, it is still in its infancy. It cannot be denied that whilst it may not be seen as some as the highest form of art, it is swiftly becoming the most popular, opening the door for contemporary phenomena such as the rise of video art and media installations. Having been proved as a viable medium for social commentary and continuation of the themes prevalent throughout art history, photography has become a very exciting medium. Whereas almost all of the conceivable movements of painting have been exhausted over the past thousands of years, and the idea that painting is redundant now that technology has changed our world-view so much (and how we see painting), the rise of digital manipulation has taught us that there is still so much more about photography that we are yet to learn. Photography is here, and it is here to stay.